VC Firm E.ventures Makes Its Internal Tracking Tool, The Daily Gieselmann, Available To All

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A few years ago, E.ventures co-founder Tom Gieselmann decided to try to use data to give his firm a competitive advantage. And so he built a tracking tool to keep tabs on how different web properties were growing over time. The Daily Gieselmann, named after its founder, has been used by the company internally over that time. But it’s now being opened up for anyone to use.

Rather than rely strictly on metrics provided by the companies that E.ventures was looking to invest in, the Daily Gieselmann gave the firm a more objective look at how potential and existing investments were doing. The platform also keeps screenshots of every new site indexed, so that users can quickly see what they are.

Using third-party data from Alexa and other providers, the internal dashboard helped the firm determine which companies were adding users and increasing engagement, which were stalled, and which were actually declining. It’s also a great way to discover under-the-radar companies to put money into.

The platform enables folks at E.ventures to get updates on these companies daily. But more importantly, it sees the effects of user growth over time. Gieselmann sends out a weekly newsletter with new entrants to the growth index, and also makes note of companies and websites that are already on it, but have hit record highs.

While Alexa is generally an imperfect tool for absolute traffic or page rank, E.ventures has found that it does a pretty good job of measuring growth over time. That said, rather than rely solely on the company’s trending data, E.ventures actually captures the rankings daily and does its own trend analysis based on the data over time.

Also, it’s not just Alexa — the Daily Gieselmann also takes into account data from iTunes: the App Store, eBooks, Movies and TV purchases. (Gieselmann says he’s not that interested in music, which is why the dashboard doesn’t also track music sales.) Using the CrunchBase API, the Daily Geiselmann also lets users cross-reference ranking and trend data across company and investor info that has been collected over the years.

While the internal E.ventures dashboard was useful to people like Gieselmann, who knew the right tags to tease data out of it, it wouldn’t be very useful to the average user. That is, until recently, when the team threw a more useful user interface on it. Now, other data junkies can mine the data that E.ventures has collected over the years.